68 SIXTEENTH CENTURY. pt. hi. 



Galen could be wrong. It happened, unfortunately, that 

 one day when he was dissecting the body of a Spanish 

 gentleman who had just died, the bystanders thought that 

 they saw the heart throb. His enemies seized upon this 

 circumstance and accused him of dissecting a living man, 

 and the judges of the Inquisition would have condemned 

 him to death, if Charles V. of Spain, whose physician he 

 had become, had not persuaded them instead to send him 

 on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. On his return from this pil- 

 grimage he was shipwrecked on the island of Zante, in the 

 Grecian Archipelago, and died of hunger when he was only 

 fifty years of age. There are of course many faulty descrip- 

 tions in Vesalius's work, for the study of anatomy was at 

 that time only beginning ; but he made the first attempt to 

 appeal to facts instead of merely repeating what others had 

 taught, and by this he earned the right to be called the 

 Founder of Modern Anatomy. 



There lived at the same time as Vesalius two other very 

 celebrated anatomists, Gabriel Fallopius, of Modena, and 

 Barthele'my Eustachius, of San Severino, near Naples, who 

 both did a great deal to advance anatomy. Eustachius 

 described the tube running between the mouth and the ear 

 which is still called the Eustachian tube, and made many 

 very useful experiments ; but, on the other hand, he at- 

 tacked Vesalius very bitterly for his criticisms of Galen's 

 anatomy.  



Gesner's Works on Animals and Plants, 1551-1566. " 

 — We now come to one of the most interesting lives 

 of the sixteenth century. Many of us know very little of flj 

 astronomy or anatomy, but any child who has gathered 

 flowers in the country or looked at wild animals in the 

 Zoological Gardens must feel interested in Gesner, the first 





